Donald Trump Jr. and Vanessa Trump at a Trump Vodka launch party in 2007. Image via the AP.

How does one begin to understand a person whose definition of “meaning”–the meaning of words, the meaning of human interaction, the meaning of life–contradicts the sum total of one’s experience of the universe? It is this question which has led me to mull over an old Donald Trump Jr. anecdote all day since it made the rounds on Twitter this morning.

In 2004, the New York Post reported on what Donald Trump Jr. considered to be a “wedding proposal.” Members of the press and TV crews were invited to the Bailey, Banks, & Biddle in the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey, where Don Jr. deposited a “quid pro quo free” diamond on the ring finger of his now-wife and mother of his children, Vanessa Haydon.

The Post adds that the Short Hills Mall event was actually the second proposal by Donald Trump Jr., which he’d framed to his fiancée as a loving gesture:

The sometime model and aspiring actress admitted she was so surprised when her boyfriend of 1 ½ years proposed that she insisted he propose again – just to be sure.

To parse that: he proposed that she insist that he propose again.

“An industry source” suggested to the Post that the deal mirrored one his father had with Graff, which presumably supplied the ring for Melania. The New York Times revisited the topic in a lengthy profile back in March, and quoted his father who criticized the proposal–not the actual proposal but the tactlessness of the execution:

Even his father joined in the criticism, saying on the CNN talk show “Larry King Live,” “You have a name that is hot as a pistol, you have to be very careful with things like this.”

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Five more people bearing the name “Trump” sprung from this union, including one Donald Trump the Third. A rose by any other name is still a rose...but what is a Donald Trump without a name?